RIDM 2012: Fishing documentary Leviathan might put you off seafood

If the title, Leviathan, makes you think of whales and more specifically, Moby Dick, take another tack – this film is about a New England commercial fishing boat. It’s a You-Are-There type film, without any narration, re-enactments or explanations. (Cinéma direct is the formal term.)

Directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel attached miniature cameras to almost every available surface on the ship, and to some of the fishermen, too. Most of the film was shot at night and most of the action takes place on the deck of the ship, as nets are hauled in and emptied of their catch. There’s lots of slopping water and soon – lots of fish blood, too.

What I learned: The work looks physically challenging, unpleasant and dangerous. It’s probably very easy to be injured – from repetitive motions, sharp instruments, heavy chains, or unexpected lurches of the ship.

When the men (I did not see any women) are not working really hard, boredom looks like a distinct possibility. We see one guy just staring, for an uncomfortably long time – whether he was looking at a TV or at nothing, I can’t recall. It doesn’t look like anyones idea of a dream job.

I know that scenes from an abattoir would be much worse, but I was shocked at the cruelty involved with catching skate. These fish had their “wings” cut off, and were then thrown back into the ocean, still alive, though not for long, I guess. Skates have a recognizable face, too, even if it is as flat as a piece of paper. The filmmakers show it (seemingly) looking at us, its mouth opening and closing, in what I assume is an attempt to keep breathing.

(There’s a movement to protect sharks, which are sometimes caught only for their fins, and then thrown back into the ocean. Maybe nobody knows about the skates.)

The credits of Leviathan are done in some kind of pseudo-calligraphic font that’s sort of pretty but difficult to read quickly. (I am surprised that someone did not point this out.)

These credits list the Latin names of all the fish that were caught in the film. This list is so long that I wonder if all those fish were the intended catch or if the ship in question is one of those trawlers that just scoops up everything in its path, whether there’s a market for it or not.

Many people like Leviathan better than I do, and I’ll quote some of them in a moment.

(I have to say, I am enjoying writing about it now, more than I enjoyed watching it then. The morning that I saw it, I had to rush out of my apartment without having had any coffee. Maybe caffeine deprivation affected my judgment and appreciation. )

I want to emphasize that I don’t hate this film by any means, and I did learn a lot, but if a friend asked me what to see at RIDM, there are many other films that I’d suggest before Leviathan. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not read so much praise before I saw it.

You’ll find some of that praise below, take it with a grain of (sea)-salt.

Jordan Cronk in Slant Magazine: “Leviathan is one of the most uniquely fashioned films ever produced. . . . Castaing-Taylor and Paravel take appropriate measures to put the audience directly in the proverbial line of fire. . . Leviathan is . . .an action movie par excellence, careening from kinetic would-be set pieces to tense moments of reconciliation between man and nature, a push-pull that lends the experience a gripping sense urgency. . . .Leviathan leapfrogs its own classifications, arriving somewhere between detailed procedural and high-art drama. . . Leviathan organizes many entities, both concrete and intangible, as opposing forces—first and foremost the communication between man and nature, but also the battle between the vulnerable and the impervious, the recurrent and the unchecked, and the fine line between heaven and hell on Earth, aggravated and antagonized by human interference or not.”

I admire Jordan Cronk’s way with words, (seriously, I’m not being sarcastic or anything) but I was not as moved by the film as he was.

Don Simpson in Smells Like Screen Spirit:“The kinetic pacing lends Leviathan the air of a sea-faring action flick, while the off-kilter perspective of the low resolution cinematography turns the film into an experimental art piece. . .”

From the RIDM catalogue:” ‘The most thrilling film of 2012,’ in Cinema Scope’s estimation, Leviathan is a work of art so original that it would be futile to try to situate it on the cinematic landscape. . . Leviathan is a documentary of incredible formal innovation and a harrowing plunge into the ship’s labyrinthine bowels. . . .Between anthropological observation and abstract cinematic experience, Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Véréna Paravel (Foreign Parts) have created a monstrous and sublime audio-visual opus, whose carnage and shadowy setting add up to nothing less than a seaborne nightmare.”

Leviathan will be shown Saturday, Nov. 17, 2012, at 9:15 p.m. in Salle Fellini of Excentris, 3536 St. Laurent Blvd.

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